Talking to 'Wait Wait's' Peter Sagal (and watching Stephen Colbert): There are limits to comedy in the Trump era

Peter Krogh / PBS

Peter Sagal, host of "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me," in a photo for his 2013 show "Constitution USA." Members of the live audience for "Wait Wait" have told him they find the show a relief, he says, because it doesn't dwell on politics and President Trump every minute.

Peter Sagal, host of "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me," in a photo for his 2013 show "Constitution USA." Members of the live audience for "Wait Wait" have told him they find the show a relief, he says, because it doesn't dwell on politics and President Trump every minute. (Peter Krogh / PBS)

If you attended “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me’s!” big outdoor show taping in Millennium Park last week, or heard the result on the radio over the weekend, you probably noticed something unusual.

Yes, there was a threat of lightning that sent many in the crowd of more than 10,000 scurrying mid-show for the safety of nearby buildings. Yes, there was Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy telling the hilarious story of the faux bris he went through when, as an adult father of Jewish children, he decided to convert to the faith.

It involved a little gauze, Tweedy said. And then he corrected himself in mock boastfulness: “A lot of gauze.”

But the big surprise, especially for newcomers to the weekly NPR comedy news quiz, was likely more about the content of the comedy.

This is an era when President Trump dominates the news cycle: his tweets, his passions, his misdeeds and his alleged misdeeds, and sometime even the policies he enacts in the country he was elected to lead. And because of that, he also tends to dominate comedy about topical matters. If you had $10 for every time you’d heard a “joke” about tiny hands or orange hair, you’d have so much money you might not be able to wrap even large hands around the wad.

But “Wait Wait” played it — plays it — differently.

“I've really kind of embraced that our primary purpose is to give people a break from all of it,” said host Peter Sagal in an interview the day after the taping. “And that means two things. It means saying rude and disrespectful and mocking things about the person who's driving them crazy, the president of the United States. And it also means to stop talking about the president of the United States. And that is a line that we navigate every week.”

So at the “Wait Wait” taping, Sagal and his panelists bantered about the fraud trial of Paul Manafort, Trump’s foppish former campaign manager. They talked about Trump’s idea of establishing a “Space Force,” which the vice president revived last week. “I was actually excited to see that Mike Pence believes in space,” said panelist Peter Grosz.

And then the show, for its 6 million weekly listeners, moved on: to a Dutch hotel that bills itself as the worst, to the business in Japan that rents out middle-aged men, to Sagal mock-warning the well-heeled crowd picnicking on the Pritzker Pavilion lawn, in a Woodstock reference, “Watch out for the brown pate.”

How to handle the Trump era is proving challenging to comedy, largely because it is revealing the limits of comedy. On the one hand, Stephen Colbert on CBS’s “Late Show” is making ratings hay by being the comic most persistently aghast that we find this man, who seems to fail most significant tests of character and who has not, in fact, hired “the best people,” as our president. On other hand, to what end?

Will the next “Late Show” monologue joke finally tip the Trump faithful over into the column of skeptics? Is it powerful, or satirical in any way, to expose various Trump-world acolytes as gullible and willing to say offensive things, as Sacha Baron Cohen is doing in his current “Candid Camera” update, “Who Is America?”? Or is comedy, in the end, inadequate to the task of treating significant topics, as the Australian comic Hannah Gadsby argues in her current Netflix special “Nanette”?

Sagal said one of his show’s regular panelists, Adam Felber, a writer for HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” told a story about Maher during the 2016 presidential election: “Maher apparently was looking around the writers room and said something to the effect of, you know, ‘If Trump gets elected, what does that say about us? What good are we?’ You know, it’s this notion that, ‘Here we all are mocking those who are most deserving of mockery.’ And what happens if the person most deserving of mockery gets elected? It means no one is paying any attention to us.

“Your irrelevance can’t be underlined more vividly. I had never felt that we spoke truth to power. I had gotten over that a long time ago. But I thought we spoke sense to people, and apparently it wasn’t doing anybody any good. And there’s been a lot of self-aware chat about that among comedians. I’ve heard Samantha Bee say this. I’ve heard Jon Stewart say this. I’ve heard Colbert say this. And that is, none of us expect any of the things we’re saying to do any good. I.e., change people’s opinions. I.e., get people to vote differently.”

Sagal said he has been thinking about this a lot in the long months since Trump was elected. And he has come to the conclusion that the show can do the most good by staying in its moderately happy place.

“Nobody tunes into us to, you know, get political wisdom or get their outrage stoked or get pointed toward activism,” he said. “People tune into us for a break from all of that. We spend time talking to the audience afterward and every time we do that people come up and they tell me how much it means to them to have us at the end of the week giving them a break. And they mean that just in terms of, you know, how tough the week is and then they get to ‘Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!’ And it's funny and it's enjoyable and it's goofy and that's such a pleasure.”

There is a push and a pull on his show, the host said, between people wanting to do more political material, typically Sagal, and those wanting to do less, including executive producer Mike Danforth. And then the audience’s responses at the live tapings — which typically provide 90 minutes of material to be edited down into the weekly hour — guide the final call.

Because no matter how acerbic the comedy about Trump, it can feel like both too much and too little. Watching Colbert, for instance, there is on the one hand the feeling that he has completely come into his own as a host performing as himself, rather than the persona he inhabited on his Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report.” Nobody currently plying the trade has a quicker mind in the moment. Nobody is a more graceful physical presence standing on that “X” to deliver a monologue. Nobody manages to convey a deeper sense of a soul and a conscience underpinning what he has to say.

But even his most die-hard admirers vacillate between admiration for Colbert’s talent and his dedication to the cause and a feeling that maybe he needs to develop a slider and a change-up to go with that devastating curveball.

As Sagal, also an ardent fan, puts it: “Even I get a little tired of seeing that his monologues are all Trump all the time, because it’s exhausting.”

Watching Colbert these days — or Seth Meyers on NBC, or Jimmy Kimmel on ABC, who have also mined the Trump vein pretty tirelessly — you get a sense that Colbert knows this, that the unrelenting nature of news out of the White House is knocking some of the glee out of his presentation. But also that he feels a moral compulsion to keep going. History will prove him right. Somebody has to fight the fight. That kind of thing.

The Cohen series on Showtime, on the other hand, makes headlines every week because of the marks the British comic has been able to find for his various characters. But that show has left me cold.

“Sacha Baron Cohen Gets Pro-Gun Activist to Put a Dildo in His Mouth,” as one headline put it, is a thing that happened on the show. But is it any kind of satirical triumph to dupe the eminently dupe-able? And does that outweigh the elements of homophobia inherent in this and other Cohen pranks?

“Corey Lewandowski Defends Neo-Nazis On Sacha Baron Cohen’s Show” was another one. If you watched the former Trump campaign manager being led along by Cohen’s ultra-right conspiracy theorist character, however, Lewandowski doesn’t come across as a defender of righteousness, but he also seems a lot less comfortable with the things Cohen says than the headline would imply.

It’s been instructive that people on the level of former Vice President Dick Cheney, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin don’t have better filters in place to prevent them from becoming marks for someone like Cohen.

But to my mind the best moments have come not in the serial duping of the right — “his spree of humiliating key conservative figures,” as the site Real Clear / Life put it — but in the moments when Cohen’s characters reveal something about themselves. One of his characters recently told an interview subject that his sister was murdered three years ago. And then he added a seeming aside to the effect of, “And they haven’t found the body. Because they haven’t looked in the lake.”

That’s a prime example of a joke being an incomplete story: You, the listener, are left to fill in the rest of it, which leads you to the macabre but funny conclusion that Cohen’s persona has just inadvertently confessed to murder.

The incompleteness, the inadequacy, of jokes are part of the core of the revelatory Gadsby special. It is striking for its personal revelations, in front of an admiring crowd at the Sydney Opera House, about Gadsby growing up as a lesbian on conservative Tasmania, Australia.

It is also striking to hear so accomplished a comic essentially renounce comedy. Her primary lens is sexual politics, not American politics, and her outrage at male-dominated, violent, dullard culture more closely aligns with the #MeToo movement.

But her point — that a joke, in the end, cannot handle the most important stuff, because it means stopping at a point before its story is complete — is similar to some of the conclusions Sagal and his peers have reached, or wondered about, in relation to the Trump era.

“One of the things she said I thought was really interesting,” Sagal said, “is, in order for it to be funny, it can’t have a resolution. … It’s not a problem you solve. It’s a problem you laugh at, and then move on.

“I think I serve a purpose in this world by just making jokes about it, but it does point out something: That the people who are going to make a difference one way or another are not funny. And among those people who have made tremendous difference in this country and yet are not funny is Donald Trump himself.

“And the people who are in opposition most effectively to him are not funny. The Parkland kids are not making jokes. The people who are rising up in Democratic ranks are not making jokes. And that is I think how change actually happens — not through dumb people like me making dumb jokes but through actual serious people who put in really hard work and are very serious about it.”